Floor Speeches

Rep. Jared Polis (CO-2)
Special Order Remarks on Rebuilding the Economy
Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Mr. POLIS. I thank the gentleman from Virginia.

Following on the gentleman from Vermont, as well as the gentleman from Ohio, taking us back to where we were before I was in this body, my colleague from Vermont was here, when President Bush, Secretary Paulson said we need a blank check for a whole lot of money, $700 billion. 

Well, what are you going to do with it? Well, we are going to buy toxic assets. We are going to take some of the bad debt off the books of banks and we are going to then relieve them of that, and that will improve their balance sheets, and they will be able to loan again. Well, okay.

At that point the Congress said, well, not one dollar of that TARP money has gone to buying bad debt. Instead, the Bush administration started nationalizing companies left and right. They bought up banks. They are now owned by the government. They bought up automobile companies now owned by the government. They bought insurance companies. They went on a shopping spree and nationalized the means of production in this country.

Now we are at a place where you have Big Government in league with Big Business, the worst of both worlds for the people of this country. This is made worse by a recent Supreme Court decision that opened the channels for unregulated use of corporate funds to influence political elections. That is right. Congress, in its wisdom, had previously established regulations around this that they advertised, they could say call so and so to lobby them but not vote for, vote against, not within 30 days of an election. The Supreme Court threw that all out.

What you now have is a very, very dangerous situation where, let's say that the Bush administration nationalized a big bank, and let's say there was a Member of Congress didn't think they should. Well, now you have that bank can spend an enormous amount of money trying to stop the reelection of people they don't like and trying to elect people they like. You have Big Government and Big Business working together in the Bush socialist economy to the detriment of the American people.

We will be looking at solutions of campaign finance reform in Congress. A lot of it needs to start with that, for Congress to take action and be willing to take on this nexus where Big Business and Big Government operated in unholy alliance. We need to make sure that the system is influenced by the people of the country, rather than the corporations with their dollars, using them to confuse and trick people with their massive and misleading public relations attacks. I am hopeful.

I am a sponsor of the fair elections bill, a campaign finance reform bill; many of my colleagues are as well. We also need to look at disclosure requirements, shareholder approval requirements. We need to make it more difficult, not easier, for corporations to influence the United States Congress.

I yield back to the gentleman from Virginia.